Holding more surprise for its characters than its readers, this novel is nonetheless charming, warm, and wittily told.
An unassuming older man finds an unexpected new direction for his life in this debut novel.
Seventy-three-year-old Norbert Zelenka has been a quiet person his whole life and assumes he’ll live out his days thusly in a quiet tourist town in upstate New York. His first surprise, as the novel opens, is that he’s caught the attention of Carlotta’s Club, a tightknit group of three older women he sees often at The Gibbon Corner Art League and Gallery. More surprising is their suggestion that he become the town fortuneteller. It is such a ridiculous and invasive idea that Norbert would never consider it, not unless he was broke and needed to pay veterinary bills for his miniature Chihuahua and sole companion, which happens to be the situation. The club teaches him everything they know from earlier dabbles in the psychic arts, and Carlotta, their forceful leader, installs him at her niece’s floundering cafe. It turns out that Norbert has a knack for the art of card reading or, more accurately, the art of attentive listening and incisive feedback. A lot of the fun of the novel is eavesdropping on his many sessions (which hint that he has real psychic abilities, but keep the jury out on the issue). His success is welcome to all except Carlotta, who had planned to use him more as puppet than protégé. The two butt heads, and Norbert repetitively fears that he has too much responsibility for the lives of others. But this is padding before the book gets to its real question: will Norbert be able to help Carlotta’s granddaughter, Summer, who is in a real psychological crisis?
Holding more surprise for its characters than its readers, this novel is nonetheless charming, warm, and wittily told.Pub Date: March 6, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-7783-1281-9
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Park Row Books
Review Posted Online: Dec. 11, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2018
A modern day fable, with modern implications in a deceiving simplicity, by the author of Dickens. Dali and Others (Reynal & Hitchcock, p. 138), whose critical brilliance is well adapted to this type of satire. This tells of the revolt on a farm, against humans, when the pigs take over the intellectual superiority, training the horses, cows, sheep, etc., into acknowledging their greatness. The first hints come with the reading out of a pig who instigated the building of a windmill, so that the electric power would be theirs, the idea taken over by Napoleon who becomes topman with no maybes about it. Napoleon trains the young puppies to be his guards, dickers with humans, gradually instigates a reign of terror, and breaks the final commandment against any animal walking on two legs. The old faithful followers find themselves no better off for food and work than they were when man ruled them, learn their final disgrace when they see Napoleon and Squealer carousing with their enemies... A basic statement of the evils of dictatorship in that it not only corrupts the leaders, but deadens the intelligence and awareness of those led so that tyranny is inevitable. Mr. Orwell's animals exist in their own right, with a narrative as individual as it is apt in political parody.
Pub Date: Aug. 26, 1946
ISBN: 0452277507
Page Count: 114
Publisher: Harcourt, Brace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1946
The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.
Pub Date: Sept. 16, 1992
ISBN: 1400031702
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1992
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BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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